“The Minutes” hides a misremembered town secret within the records of a typical town council meeting.
The play by Tracy Letts premieres at Spokane Civic Theatre on Friday and runs through Nov. 1 in the company’s studio theater.
The 90-minute one-act play takes the audience through a Big Cherry City Council meeting. While attending a municipal government meeting is few people’s idea of a good time, director Kimberly Roberts said the dark comedy is anything but boring.
“This play is interested in how we organize ourselves – whether you’ve sat on a committee or a board at your church or your PTA or your kid’s soccer club. Anybody who has experienced a group of people who are trying to run a meeting by a set of rules and accomplish ‘the greater good’ will get a lot out of this play. And I do mean ‘greater good’ in quotes,” she said.
The small-town politicians and civil servants that populate the play have a very clear idea of the town’s origin that may not be entirely accurate. The play asks if telling the truth of history is worth the consequences.
It is also very funny, Roberts added.
“There’s no doubt the play is quite funny, but it is very dark comedy. After laughing for most of the night I hope the audience will leave the theater thinking about how we distort history and how we decide what the truth is and what truth we want to pass along to our children,” she said.
The play stars Ron Ford, Jhon Goodwin, Thomas Heppler, Scarlett Hepworth, Ilan Hernandez, Chris Jensen, Kris Kittelson, Beth Oltman, Ted Redman, Jerry Sciarrio, and Camrynne Sullivan.
Directing the play has led Roberts to reflect on Spokane’s own history – how many Native peoples were displaced so Spokane could be what it is today. Civic has employed a dramaturg to bring cultural and historical awareness to the production and its cast.
“We’ve been very intentional with our design and acting choices to avoid replicating stereotypes or creating harmful stage pictures,” dramaturg Kaya Mallick said.
“Spokane, like most cities in the United States, has an unsavory history of Native displacement and genocide. Part of my dramaturgical work has been helping the cast and crew understand how the themes of ‘The Minutes’ relate directly to our community,” she said.
Roberts thinks Spokane should do more to ensure the darker parts of our history are better understood. Through her work on “The Minutes” she learned for the first time of the Spokane horse massacre , an 1858 campaign that killed more than 800 horses.
“I grew up in Spokane. I didn’t know they slaughtered 800 horses on the plains just outside Spokane to purposely starve and coerce the people that called this area home,” she said.
Mallick also brought in critical perspectives of the play, including Gonzaga Native American studies professor Laurie Arnold, who takes issue with how the play addresses Indigenous history.
“For Native people, these histories are open wounds, reminders of the violence the United States wrought in the name of Manifest Destiny. Letts generalizes this history to serve as the town’s founding narrative, except in Big Cherry, the massacre is described as an evenly matched battle between ‘civilized’ settlers and ‘uncivilized’ Native people,” Arnold writes on Civic’s website.
“In this respect, the play infuriates me. It amplifies the worst 20th century practices of historical erasure in a 21st century moment when school boards and legislatures across the country have enacted policies limiting history education,” she said.
Still, Roberts hopes theatergoers will see the play for themselves and come to their own conclusions.
“What has really stuck with me about this play is how the need for community can have a darker side. The price we’re often willing to pay to be accepted and be part of a community can often be damaging to those outside of it,” she said.
If You Go
‘The Minutes’
When: Friday-Nov. 1; shows are 7:30 p.m. Thursdays to Saturdays; 2 p.m. Sundays; Saturday Oct. 31 performance at 2 p.m.
Where: Spokane Civic Theatre, 1020 N. Howard St.
Cost: $20-36.50, available at spokanecivictheatre.com or 509-325-250.
Read the full article here
Article by Amanda Sullender
Photos by Ryan Wasson